Rubik's cube with 6 images you choose (advertised for "family photos", but I bet they'd let you use 6 images of different Shakespeare sonnets, or the same word in different fonts, or...)--$30 at gifts.com

11.07.2007

I haven't read a new Joyce Carol Oates in years, but her forthcoming (April 2008) looks interesting: Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. From Booklist's starred review: "Protean and intrepid Oates not only pays homage to five American writers by brilliantly emulating their styles, but also…plays fast and loose with biography to imagine their final days or, in the case of Emily Dickinson, resurrection. Oates is by turns mischieviously witty, superbly macabre, and exquisitely sensitive as she parlays bravado literary criticism into shivery stories that undermine iconic figures…Oates envisions [Poe] living on as a lighthouse keeper in the South Pacific…[she] is diabolical in her satirical portrait of…Mark Twain as a pedophile."

10.09.2007

I love the concept of "reverse graffiti". Simply put: instead of using spraypaint, find a dirty city surface and use a rag and some water. Create art that instantly doubles as social commentary (Why is our city so filthy?), and befuddle the cops who want to arrest you, but aren't sure if selective cleaning is a crime. Above, Brazilian artist Alexandre Orion cleans up a Sao Paulo tunnel (in summer '06). See a video of the piece's creation, complete with befuddled cops, here.

I've listened to it all now.20 times or so.Wowie Kazowie.This is brilliant, brilliant stuff.

Those mashups I mentioned earlier were songs. The tracks on Sounds for the Space-Set are songs, social commentary, stand-up routines (their musical sense of humor ranks up there with early Ween, TMBG, and the Flaming Lips), and more. If music and pop culture have any sacred cows left, RIAA's grinding them up into half-beef, half-Moog patties. Witness:

*The somber vocal from "Space Oddity" over the bouncy music from "Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)"

*Music from Cosmos mashed with the Star Trek theme and Ella Fitzgerald singing "Out of Nowhere"

*The vocal to the original "Why Does the Sun Shine?" ("The sun is a mass of incandescent gas...") mashed with Earth, Wind & Fire's "Shining Star"

*Sinatra's "Fly Me To The Moon" with Portishead's lead singer plaintively bursting in at intervals with "Wandering Star"

*The instrumental to "Walking in Space" from Hair mashed with Eric B. and Rakim's "Follow the Leader" and something identified as "old-time radio" called "Planet Man"

9.20.2007

Worldmapper is home to a set of visually arresting world maps based on statistics (about health, wealth, energy use, pollution, etc.): in each map, countries shrink or swell up based on their numbers relative to the rest of the world.

Wealth 1990

Wealth 2015

HIV Prevalence

Nice .pdf posters of the maps--including the image, explanatory text, data tables, and more--are available for free download and printing. That "HIV Prevalence" map is a stunner.

"Dear Pastor Murphy,
It's been such a pleasure listening to your sermons these past few months. I can't tell you how delighted I am that you chose to settle in our parish. I'm sorry only that we haven't gotten a chance to know each other better. Will you be our guest for dinner on Saturday night? I'll be making my grandmother's fried chicken, and Herb has promised to whip up one of his famous tortes for dessert. You needn't bring a thing except maybe a hat, as we'll be eating on the lawn if the weather's nice..."

[Occasion: "Inviting Clergy to Dinner"]

"Dear Victoria,

I cannot thank you enough for the flawless technical support that you've given me over the last couple of months. The slides that you created for the Glazton presentation were a big hit, and the multimedia extravaganza unfolded on cue with perfect precision..."

[Occasion: "Appreciation of Technical Support"]

After a deeper perusal, I landed on

"Mike,

Sounds like you and Michelle have a great trip lined up. I could use a couple of weeks on the beach myself. With the way things are going at work, though, I won't be taking a vacation anytime soon. In fact, most nights I'll probably be working past eight. That's why I can't look after Patches while you're gone..."

[Occasion: "Declining a Request to Petsit"]

and

"Dear Dave,

I can't help cringing when I think about our argument at the ball game last weekend, about what a self-righteous blowhard I was...

[Occasion: "After an Argument with a Friend"]

...and so on. I haven't had this much fun paging through a book of letters since Joe Wenderoth's Letters To Wendy's. My first reaction was self-righteous horror (or blowhardism?): Can't people put down their Uncrustables long enough to write a nice note to the new clergyman these days? But then: who really wants to put her brain towards writing these kinds of sentences?--and these kinds of sentences are often expected and even successful, appreciated, loved.

I am reluctant to place Great Personal Letters for Busy People: 501 Ready-to-Use Letters for Every Occasion on the print reference shelf, where it will no doubt go unnoticed, gather dust, and ultimately be weeded away for lack of use. It's wonderfully browseable, and I would like to place it in the humor section, or in fiction (Could it be remarketed as a trendily wry novel called The Letter Writer?).

9.05.2007

"For he is Ishi--the last of his tribe""Couldn't help noticing your aftershave"The mind that takes this in its strideis yours and mine, and it is late--Anselm Hollo

As a kid, I loved both the Aerosmith/Run-D.M.C. version of "Walk This Way" and the club scene in "Xanadu" where the young guy's bad '80s rock vision ("Lover, I won't take a backseat...") melds with the older guy's '40s vision ("I want to dance with youtil the sun comes creepin' thru-u") (see it on YouTube)--two songs that, along with a bunch of Charles Ives' work, seem like natural precursors to mashups. Mashups (music, not app) may be my favorite form of "user-created content"--definitely what I'd be most itching to make if I had the tech.

If you're not familiar, a mashup is a new song created from two or more songs. Mashups got a lot of press 2-4 years ago (remember Danger Mouse's Jay-Z/Beatles mashup "The Grey Album"--or at least the hype around it?), but big media fascination seems to have died fairly quickly. I haven't heard many--okay, any--people talking about mashups offline for years.

I still love them, love the little disoriented feeling some give me upon first listen, the slightly chaotic position they put my brain in: two songs! at once! Holding two songs equally in your head is like thinking while driving in fast-but-thick traffic. Or, as the Hollo poem above has it, living in the 20th or 21st century. The most dissonant mashups make excellent morning commute music.

Many mashups are not at all dissonant, but seamless--sounding as though entirely original, the parts fit together so well (see "Sexual High" below). (Note: "seamless" loses value [for me] if the mash isn't a little clever--Go Home Productions has a mash of "We Will Rock You" with "Back In Black" that's entirely smooth, but a no-brainer, a puzzle anyone could have figured out). Many mashups are successful mainly as experiments (things you might want to listen to and admire once or twice--like the mashes of Eminem's "Without Me" and Glenn Miller's "In The Mood" or the Benny Hill Theme and 50 Cent's "In Da Club") ; many aren't even successful that way (There's a difference between "interestingly dissonant" and "violently clashing"). The following, a handful of my favorites, are, I think, wildly successful (even revelatory--see "Sexual High" again) as songs in their own right, and I highly recommend them to anyone just encountering this form.

Oh, yeah: I highly recommend encountering this form. If you decide to download only one of these, make it the already-much-mentioned "Sexual High." Only three? Add "Callin' On Sunday" and "Making Plans for Vinyl." The rest, as you see fit. They're especially fun to listen to when you're familiar with both (or all) of the source songs--and when the source songs are from very different genres. I've arranged them by mashup artist.

Mark Vidler/Go Home ProductionsVidler is currently offering a retrospective of his mashups for free download (click link), including those below. If you're at all interested, don't miss it--availability will expire soon.

"Making Plans for Vinyl"--XTC's "Making Plans for Nigel" and Tweet's "Oops (Oh My)"--I used to love "Making Plans for Nigel." This is better.

"The Weather Episode"--Crowded House's "The Weather With You"/Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre

"Karma in the Life"-- Beatles' "In the Life"/Radiohead's "Karma Police"

"Sexual High"--Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing"/Radiohead's "High and Dry" (not available on site, try here)--I love Marvin Gaye, but I've always found "Sexual Healing" creepy ("Wake up, wake up" my ass, you old perv). Stripped of its bumbling electronic bassline and accompanied by Radiohead's gentle guitar riff, it finally becomes for me a song about what it really isabout--longing, not just sidling up and trying to get some.

"Shannon Stone" --Shannon's "Let the Music Play" and the Rolling Stones

"Rapture Riders"--Blondie's "Rapture" and the Doors' "Riders On The Storm"--really kicks when Debbie Harry comes in with the "Fab Five Freddy" rap towards the end

Party Ben (all available on site for free download)"Callin' On Sunday" --a mash of U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and Lyric's Born's "Callin' Out"--Sublime. I was surprised at how nice it was to NOT hear Bono's vocal.

"Galvanize the Empire"--The Chemical Brothers' "Galvanize" and John Williams' Stormtrooper March--Kitschy as it is, this somehow moves beyond being one of those "mere experiments"...I'm not a big Star Wars fan, but I can imagine the blast this was on the dance floor when it debuted (Party Ben, like many mashup artists, is a DJ). Hear it on YouTube, without having to download anything, here (might have to close your eyes to concentrate [grin]).

Irn Mnky"J.C.R.E.A.M. [Johnny Cash Rules Everything Around Me]"--Johnny Cash's "Get Rhythm" and Wu Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M."--Extra credit for only having to change one word in the title. Hear it instantly here on YouTube (NOTE: there's no visual--someone just posted it so we could listen).Dangerous Orange"Hurts Like Teen Spirit" --Johnny Cash's "Hurt," Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper" and something by New Order.--There's no improving on the original Cash track, but this is a good example of a masher handling more than two tracks deftly, and I like the way the Blue Oyster Cult vocals seem to rise and swirl through the song, like past ghosts haunting Cash's persona.

Pheugoo"Like I Love Your Generation"--Justin Timberlake's "Like I Love You"/Bob Sinclar's "Love Generation"--This sounds a little off at first. I think Sinclar's chord progressions are in tune with Timberlake's vocal, but they're not the same as those used in the original "Like I Love You"--a shift my brain has a hard time accepting. A minute into the track, when Sinclar's vocals are added into the mix, all doubts are erased--this is skillful, even beautiful.

Norwegian Recycling"How Six Songs Collide"--Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours," Howie Day's "Collide," Five for Fighting's "Superman," Angela Ammons' "Always Getting Over You," something from Boyzone and...?--A little light for my taste, but lovely and well-done--almost makes hearing Howie Day palatable. Hear it immediately, without downloading, on YouTube here [I'm starting to realize that YouTube is as much a listening station as a video site].

DJ Clivester"Am I Undone?"--Erasure's "Am I Right?"/Korn's "Coming Undone"/Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice"--I love Chorus-era Erasure, but "Am I Right?" is undoubtedly the suckiest song they ever recorded. I'm amazed that anyone picked it up, brushed it off, and tried to make something of it. More amazed that he did a good job. Click on the link to hear it without having to download.

Robotic Intergalactic Astro-Artists (RIAA)"Intergalactic Centerfold" (scroll down to #16 to play, without having to download)--Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic Planetary"/J. Geils Band "Centerfold"--I haven't heard the rest of "Sounds for the Space-Set" yet, but can't wait: how can you not love a song called "Head Like a Moog"? (NOTE: Beastie Boys mashups are practically their own genre, and no mention would be complete without The Beastles--dj BC's mashups of the Beasties and the Beatles. I've not yet heard them.)

8.31.2007

There's an interesting fault-line between poets who see technique and craft as essential and those who get impatient with that. In Creeley's letter to Rothenberg on the deep he expresses a certain impatience with those who write off the engagement of the poet with the language itself. Creeley says it's not the time to do away with the technical innovations of O'Hara, Creeley himself, Williams, Ginsberg--at exactly the time when Bly was proposing to do just that.

A lot of poets who don't believe in engagement with language end up not going as far as they might have. At some point they come up against a set of serious limitations.

I think this fault-line is more significant than the avant/quietude one.

My comment at Jonathan's: Hear, hear. And, for me, a quietude poem/poet that interestingly engages with language can be more welcome than an avant one that does not, never mind my usual bent. I think there has been a widespread assumption that avant poems by default "engage with language"--no, no, no they don't.

8.30.2007

Great post from Kasey and I haven't even finished reading it, so apologies there, but I want to quote all that I've read for those who might not get over to {LIME TREE} on a regular basis (after this point it becomes less general--a review of Human Resources by Rachel Zolf). I've completely slipped out of "posts of substance" at Poesy Galore (I think there were a few back in 2005), and I regret that. Things don't get from the brain to the blog, somehow, and it's not like riding a bicycle.

But I have been thinking just this for a while. Thanks to Kasey for articulating and writing it:

We have been dealing for some time now with that awkward moment in contemporary poetic practice where innovation and novelty give way to the basic problem of reflecting the state of human language with a feeling accuracy. "Feeling" is the key term here, for while it is valid to object that anyone can slap together a jumble of computer code, spam text, and instant messaging slang and call it a poem, it is more useful to acknowledge that such materials really are a significant portion of what the poet now has to work with, and that if one is truly interested in contemporary poetry, one must reckon with these materials--or rather, their application--in a way that is neither superficially celebratory nor blindly dismissive.

The problem of separating a facile from an artful engagement with "a selection of language really used by men," as Wordsworth put it, is that radical historical changes in such language occur at a pace that appears both gradual and dramatic to its reflective users (e.g., poets). The sense of newness is perpetually at war with the sense that this is what we've settled into without even noticing it starting. The poet who treats it as a novelty will write verse that is at best novel, at worst cynically fashionable. The poet who works with an actual feeling for the language in its awkward transitional throes is the rarer case. In the context of language as it has been transformed specifically by recent online communication technology, for example, I think of artists like Alan Sondheim not just as pioneers but as feeling pioneers.

It's important not to dilute "feeling" as I mean it here with a simplistic sense of "emotion," or "authenticity." I'm talking about feeling in the sense of the carpenter's feel for wood and awl, or the sewist's for fabric and thread: in other words, "craft," but more than mechanical craft. Craft as it is defined by the craftsperson's aesthetic attunement to the materials. What does it mean to have a sympathetic "feel" for computer code, for hack ad copy, for typo-ridden cable news tickers? Whereas Wordsworth embraced "common speech" out of affection (however paternalistic and "romanticized") for the working classes, our relation to today's common speech is invariably more conflicted, if not downright anxious. Can materials that seem degraded not just to a literary establishment, but often to the poet herself, be used "feelingly" in the way I'm trying to get at here?

Answering this question is, as I see it, one of the primary tasks of contemporary poetics.-- K. Silem Mohammad

8.29.2007

"A nun, while waving a two-foot crucifix over me, called me an immodest and sinful dresser. A strange man of questionable intentions and even more questionable body odor proposed marriage to me. A ten-year-old berated me for refusing to page his brother over the PA system and ask where his Playstation memory card was. A father insisted I harshly scold his five-year-old son for breaking the binding on a book to 'teach him a lesson.'

And yet, people constantly remark how easy it must be to work at the library. They envision the circulation desk staff sitting at expansive desks, flipping through literary journals or thick leather-bound novels and pausing only to exchange intelligent conversation with academics who have decided to check out something along the lines of War and Peace.

Not so much."

Check out the rest--it's a fun, quick read. Oddest patron request I ever had at a library? A phone call from a man who'd left his glass eye in the men's room and asked if I could retrieve it and hold it at the desk so he could come pick it up (I did).

8.27.2007

Via BoingBoing: a 1945 deck of tarot cards made by Slovenian architect and painter Boris Kobe while he was living as a political prisoner in Allach concentation camp, a sub-camp of Dachau. See the whole deck at the University of Minnesota's Holocaust and Genocide Studies page.

If I didn't love the Hype Machine for the ease of finding great free music I might not have heard otherwise, I'd love it for the ease of discovering great song titles ("The Private Life of a Cat") and band names (The Lovekevins)--it's fun just to look.

Favorite two band names I've come across there:

That Summer, At Home, I Had Become The Invisible Boy(which is a quote from...name that movie)

and

That's Him! That's The Guy!(which is a quote from...name that TV show)

8.17.2007

I was talking to a patron (at work I have to call them "customers," but I think "patrons" sounds more respectful, less cheap) today about depression and anxiety--how hard it is for loved ones who don't "get it," how hard it is to watch one's loved ones not getting it. I wrote an article attempting to explain it to those who'd never been through it a few years back, and dug it up for him on the web. It was published in Letters from CAMP Rehoboth, a GLBTQ journal in Rehoboth Beach, DE (I wrote monthly columns then). I've decided to re-post it here, because I think it still works and says stuff that one can't say when one's in the thick of it. Here goes:

How Your Depressed Partner Feels

I do nothing. I sit. I stare at the screen, where a cute sad dot takes Zoloft and starts to smile. For the first time in five years, my drugs have stopped working.

My partner, who I’ve been with for four, has never known the me that seems on her way back. If I become as sick as I was before, I won’t be able to help her through it. I’ll be more log than partner, less companionable than a house fly. I won’t have the will to describe what hurts, and how.

I want to try now, while I can taste it, for her and for anyone who has a depressed partner, to describe how it feels.

Being alive is desperately uncomfortable, like a drive-you-crazy case of poison ivy. For a while you try to find the thing that will make you feel better: another cigarette, a certain food or drink. But nothing does—not these, and not the love and concern of your partner and friends. Those things can actually feel burdensome: you want to be "up" for them, enough to assure them of something, when all the while you feel like you’re in a different, barely livable dimension. You know you’re hurting their feelings because you can’t make long eye contact (it’s painful to look at them while feeling so far away from them) or smile (it feels phony, and being phony with someone you love feels terrible) and seem unwilling to try—but you are trying; you’re trying every minute, struggling your ass off.

I remember lying completely still all day for months, a blanket pulled over my head, looking as if I was "giving in" to my depression. I was working so damn hard under that blanket! And what I was doing was trying not to kill myself. The feeling that I needed to was as urgent as a healthy person’s need to breathe. Staying alive felt not like being Sisyphus, pushing a rock uphill every day for eternity, but like being Prometheus, chained to a rock, his liver eaten out by vultures every day for all time. Most mentally healthy people feel like Sisyphus at one time or another, but few feel like Prometheus. I hope to Zeus I never do again.

However extreme it sounds, not killing myself at that time was an excruciating sacrifice made again every second for my family. To lay down my (mentally healthy, mostly) life for them now would not be as large. When you’re that sick, the desire to "free" yourself of life is no less instinctual than the actions of the fox that gnaws off his leg to get free of a trap. My wrists, then, were as tempting and magnetic to me as the object of an obsessive crush. I bought wristbands to hide them from myself. I kept peeking. I resorted to sitting on my wrists most of the time. I wasn’t afraid I would slit them, nothing that delicate. I was afraid I’d gnaw through them.

Try to understand this if a clinically depressed person you love attempts or successfully commits suicide. Don’t plague yourself—or the person, if s/he lives—with Why?s. The three preceding paragraphs are why.

There are as many myths and preconceptions about clinically depressed people as there are about gays and lesbians. The only things we haven’t been accused of yet are having a "mentally ill agenda" and hanging around restrooms trying to seduce kids into a life of nervous breakdowns.

Knowing that some hold these myths about my depression is as painful to me as knowing that others hold them about my homosexuality. So, in closing, two quick attempts at myth-dispelling.

1. People With Depression Should "Buck Up" and Get Over It. People with mild depressive periods may be able to "buck up" and get through, but asking this of someone with a major depressive disorder is akin to asking a diabetic to "be a man" and forgo insulin. The longer someone seriously ill tries to buck up without seeking help, the worse and more damaging his or her depression may get. I "bucked up" for three years before coming out depressed. When I finally did, it was only because my legs were shaking so badly I couldn’t stand up. I was afraid to leave my bedroom. And I was due on campus to teach two sections of English 101.

2. You Should Be Able to Snap Out of Depression Because It’s "All In Your Mind." Um, is there any worse place it could be? If I had broken ribs, I could do something to "take my mind off" the pain. But a broken mind’s always with you. There’s no way to outrun it, no distraction, no relief.

I think we find that hard to believe or accept because we find it so hard to imagine. I hope that, this article notwithstanding, you and yours will always find it hard to imagine. I was originally thinking of titling this "Depression: Clip N’ Save!" But I hope you never need it. I hope your lover never needs it. And I hope, in a few weeks, with me on a new, effective drug cocktail, mine won’t need it.

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,Out of black bean and wet slate bread,Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,They Lion grow.

I mean, Jesus, that's good. And though Levine wrote other decent poems, none of them ever had the thrill for me--or the ear, the command of syllables--as "They Feed They Lion." If I didn't know he'd written it, I wouldn't guess that he had.

Jonathan mentions Strand's "Keeping Things Whole" as another example (I never liked that one, but I know what he means: it's more striking than most later Strand). And he wonders, well, is this because nothing excites us as much as the first poem we love by a poet? Whatever we encounter first, we love most (I think of hearing a cover song repeatedly before hearing the original, and never liking the original as much, even if it's clearly better). I'm not sure. And I think there's a reverse capacity--to be turned off by the first poems one reads by a certain poet, only to later be shocked at intriguing work from the same hand ("Anyone lived in a pretty how town" in no way prepared me for "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands").

Somehow, with Levine, I think it's more to do with that poem than with the fact that it's the first I read. I'm sure I read it in an anthology and that it was followed up with some competent other Levines--it wasn't like it was years before I'd come to read the so-so stuff, or that it wasn't contemporaneous with Lion.

Where did that one come from? A dream? A high? A more electrifying poet channeled?

(PS--at GMU we were assigned the classic "7 up, 7 down" experiment where you choose a poem and replace each noun, verb, etc., with one you find roughly 7 up or down in the dictionary. I ended up with "They Federalize They Lips" [grin])

8.15.2007

There's a hilarious short article at Slate on "crafting the vote" ("Forget NASCAR dads and security moms—it's the craft vote that can no longer be ignored"), including a swift gallery of crafts for Democrats and Republicans. Love the national security level quilt, above.

I love the library I work at and actually [gulp] take pride in it--so it was a real treat (yes, I've said "real treat" and "take pride" in one sentence--did I mention I recently turned 33?) yesterday to see the results of the teen YouTube contest we ran over the summer (we're the first Hennepin County library to run one). Below is the winner, "Common Misperceptions About the Eden Prairie Library." A link to the also excellent runners-up follows.

8.08.2007

Sorry no posts for so long--lotsa craziness here, including a totalled car last week (no injuries, no fault). From BoingBoing this morning:

Representative Bob Allen, a Republican in the Florida House of Representatives, blamed the weather and his fear of black men for offering $20 to perform oral sex on a man in a public park. The man turned out to be an undercover police officer, who promptly arrested Allen.

365gay has more on what happened:Titusville Officer Danny Kavanaugh who was on plainclothes duty says he observed Allen entering the washroom twice. Kavanaugh said he was drying his hands in a stall when Allen peered over the stall door.

The officer's report said that after peering over the stall a second time, Allen pushed open the door and joined Kavanaugh inside. Allen muttered "'hi" and then said, "'this is kind of a public place, isn't it,'" the report said.

Kavanaugh wrote that he asked Allen about going somewhere else and Allen suggested going "across the bridge, it's quieter over there."

"Well look, man, I'm trying to make some money; you think you can hook me up with 20 bucks?" Kavanaugh wrote in the report that he had asked Allen.

The Republican lawmaker, the report said, replied, "Sure, I can do that, but this place is too public."

According to Kavanaugh's statement, the officer said, "do you want just (oral sex)?" and Allen replied, "I was thinking you would want one."

In March, he co-sponsored an unsuccessful bill that would have enhanced penalties for "offenses involving unnatural and lascivious acts" such as indecent exposure.

The Florida Times Union reports: "In his seven years in the Legislature Rep. Bob Allen of Merritt Island has built up a 92 percent approval rating with the Christian Coalition of Florida on issues like abortion, marriage and pornography."

[Note from PG: Kavanaugh is black, and the weather was bad--Allen says he took shelter in the restroom because of the weather, and was afraid to not offer Kavanaugh a blowjob because Kavanaugh is black]

7.05.2007

...there's been a bit moreinterest in Shelf Check, the library cartoon I started in April but didn't exactly keep up with (this blog had less library-type, more poet-type readers at the time). I'll be updating it more regularly from now on, and I've added a link to it in my sidebar. Today's cartoon: Jan's Dirty Secret.

6.27.2007

email from my brother this a.m.:

Greetings--Below is the flight and hotel info for our upcoming Aruba trip. Bask in its glory and feel the unrequited Carribean bliss. Wallow in your domestic, provincial surroundings as we recline on white sands and clear water for as far as the eye can see. Attempt--and fail--to vicariously experience the unrelenting rest and relaxation that will commence all too soon. Contain your seething jealousy and desire to be as we are and go where we go, refraining from physical violence or other destructive outlets. Instead wear masks of polite and tactful encouragement, feigning altruistic happiness while secretly longing to wring our oiled, tanned, & well-massaged necks.

My emailed response to my brother this a.m.:

Enjoy! And may you be unable to get the Beach Boys' "Kokomo" out of your head the entire time you're in Aruba, Jamaica, ooooooh I wanna take ya, especially during sexual relations, to Bermuda, Bahamas, or should I say, during those times that might have been exquisite for having, Come on pretty mama, sexual Key Largo relations, but will not be, Montego, because you will not Baby why don't we go, be able down to perform with all those Kokomo Beach Boys crooning as if into your very skull and soul.

Yikes. A 1938 letter from Disney rejecting Mary Ford's application to their animators' school reads: Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is performed entirely by young men. For this reason girls are not considered for the training school. (via BoingBoing)

I just love the logic: "Women do not..." [Why?] "...because that work is performed entirely by young men."

One also wonders what the cut-off age for "young men" was. "Yo, Gramps, keep yer hand steady, looks like yer Mickey's crumpin'!"

6.26.2007

Lifehacker ran a post on "library hacks" a while back. Here's my own hack for the poetry-reading, no-longer-have-access-to-academic-libraries crowd: find out if your public library subscribes to Academic Search Premier, a database containing the full text of tons of academic journals...and lit journals. Yes--you can be mildly disgusted by the current issue of Poetry for free without having to skim it surreptitiously at Barnes & Noble!

In Academic Search Premier, click on "Publications" to search for a journal. If it's there (and offers more than just the bibliographic records, which many mags do), click on the journal's name and presto--the full text of every issue, often going back years. American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chicago Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, etc., are all available in full text. It's also a good way to check out a journal's bent over time if you're looking for places to submit. If only it had the full text of Pleiades, or The Canary, or...

6.23.2007

I've been a restless reader lately: the new Chabon comes in on reserve for me, I want the new McEwan instead. I check out 30 library books, end up rereading something from my own shelves. The one book I've been successful at returning to (as opposed to reading a piece of, then dropping) amidst all this is Edward Dorn's Way More West: New and Selected Poems. Anyone who has been in a marching band--or hell, attended a parade--might actually need Dorn's "Sousa" [selections]:

Great brass bell of austerityand the ghosts of old picnickersambling under the box-elder when the sobrietywas the drunkeness. John,

you child, you drumhead, there is no silenceyou can't decapitate...

Your soft high flute and brassremind me of a lost celebration I can'tquite remember,in which I volunteered as conqueror...

I sing Sousa.The desire to disentegrate the Earthis eccentric...

Then, on the next page, this:

Like a Message on Sunday

Sitsthe forlorn plumberby the riverwith his daughterstaring at the waterthen, at herhis daughter closely.

Once World, he cameto our house to fix the stoveand couldn'toh, we were arrogant and talkedabout him in the next room, doesn'ta man know what he is doing?

Can't it be done right,World of iron thorns.Now they sit by the meagre riverby the water...stareinto that plumberso that I can see a daughter in the watershe thin and silent,he, wearing a baseball capin a celebrating town this summer seasonmay they live on

on, may their failure be kindly, and comein small pieces.

That I keep returning to Way More West means I'm on page 23.I want to keep reading.

6.14.2007

I remember reading Stein's How To Write--"a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is"--and disagreeing more than I usually do with her, not least because one of the most evocative sentences I've ever read was hers, when describing the interior of a house in "The Good Anna": And everywhere were little things that break.

Another favorite, from Vonnegut: Like so many Americans, she was trying to cobble together a life from things she had found in gift shops.

Yesterday, I stumbled on One Sentence, a blog that features "true stories, told in one sentence" (each from a different author). While some read like PostSecrets without the art ("He threw the condom out the car door when we were finished over a year ago, but I still feel guilty that I didn't stop him from littering"--can't you just see the postcard?), others are interesting as sentences-in-themselves:

The man's face was so badly decomposed that the cop asked me, "Well, does this look like something he would have done with his hair?"

I sat by a peat fire in Ireland and picked fat ticks off an orange cat with heated tweezers for three hours while reading Joyce. (ok, stopped believing at "Joyce"--but still fun)

It's the emptiest feeling in the world when you know your friends are out having fun, and you are at your dining room table, weeping and scrapbooking. (the "scrapbooking" seals it for me)

I was closing a cereal box one night when I became very aware of my height.

So I told her "When you go to college try to send me a letter."

I realized it was Sunday when I drove up to Chick-fil-a and it was closed.

Best library outreach I've seen in a while: smack in the middle of the Midtown Farmer's Market last week in Minneapolis, East Lake Library (located about 10 blocks from the market--a Minneapolis, not Hennepin County, library) was holding a storytime and will weekly. Clearly posted was info about other storytimes and summer offerings available at the branch. Bravissimo!

6.07.2007

Via Kottke, a Photoshopped series of people kissing themselves. What's fascinating are not the images so much as seeing how people chose to approach themselves: some erotically, some tenderly, some shyly, some matter-of-factly. There's a whiff of "consciousness raising exercise" here, and I think how much easier (and more natural-feeling) it would be to pose slapping myself or shaking myself by the shoulders. There are 27 photos in the series--take a look.

I first encountered Glenum's work in POM2 and I absolutely flipped for it. I ended up writing a poem for POM2 that incorporated phrases from her piece. Expressions like "one of our finest poets" or "among the best of her generation" make me puke, but...Hounds is an important book. And brilliant and meaty and bloody and only ten dollars--!

4.27.2007

I opened up Gail Godwin's 2006 novel Queen of the Underworld--a "scantily-clad autobiographical novel set in 1950s Miami," according to Publisher's Weekly--to find this epigraph:

Caminante, no hay camino.Se hace camino al andar.--Antonio Machado

which I recognized as the epigraph to another book, Carolyn Forche's 1976 Gathering the Tribes. A list of books or poems that share the same epigraph might be fascinating. Anyone know off-hand of any others?

and paid for the house. I felthouse on my heel then instep and toe.I had a bad foot and I paidto get it fixed so I could walk here.I paid for the house and I paid for thefoot that touches it. I paid to bedirected rectangularly and down a hall.I curved my body to directmy waste through a hole. I am helpedand paying for it.

[next poem]

Kill so we feel safe and comfortable--Catherine Wagner

This is called Mississippi mash, this kind of kick--leg up,foot smashed against both sides opponent's head,or spinneret, foot comes round your bodyturning backward fast, and hooks 'em.Squeezed tight between my legsso we feel safe and comfortable.Who's my fucker? Who will be my special fucker?

2. Kaia Sand's Interval (Edge, 2004). Edge is Rod Smith's press, and I like it. They also published Heather Fuller's perhaps this is a rescue fantasy (if I had it, I'd probably put it on this list, too--"Sudden Clutter" from that book is one of my favorite poems)

Madrigal for Jules--Kaia Sand

Who are the egrets we eyedas we feel searchinglyas we reveal

or who is the egret we markas we overturn pagesas we learn

how bookcliff's wonder to be fiercenow we lip salute without lossgesture struck as we are

There's a "5 books of poetry that haven't really been hugely in the spotlight but that you highly recommend" thing going around. I'll post my 5 over the next day or so, with a representative poem from each. Here's one for tonight:

We're having tea and Ritzcrackers, my mother and I,dressed in chemises, shingled andbobbed, in the sitting roomof my first apartment. (She'sa little jealous.) Hey,Ma, I say, Susan Anthonywon! We're getting the vote!She moves like a brownbird on a brown branch.

We're having tea--the sugaris rationed--my mother andI, wearing trousers and snoods,in a soldier's canteen. (I'mher supervisor.) Hey, Ma, Isay, have you seen thatmovie about Scarlett O'Hara, theheroine who proves, once andfor all, that a womancan be hard as nailsyet loved by millions? Shehefts a widget, not too friendly.

We're taking spoonfuls of blue-green algae in the solariumof the nursing home (I'mgetting tired; her joints aresprightly.) We're dressed inleopardskin aerobicwear. Hey,Ma, I say, there's thisguy who says all religionsderive from a shared mythology.What do you think? Sheswivels and ridesaway on her trike.

I'm eating bread and wateralone, naked as the dayI was born. Hey, Ma,I say, though she's notaround, you won't believe this.Physicists say that inaddition to a yes and ano, the universe contains a maybe.Off in the distance, under the stars,she moves like a platypus,neither here nor there.

4.11.2007

Man: I've been doing some genealogical research, and I found out there was a DIVORCE [shudders] in my family! It was the husband who registered the complaint, but I can't tell what it was for...can you find me a list of the grounds for divorce in 1810 in [state name]?

3.03.2007

2.20.2007

Well, this is effing cool: upload a pic into Textorizer, and it replaces the strongest lines with lines of text you provide. To try it out, I fed it this picture, from when I was maid of honor in my sister's wedding:

1.22.2007

To check out: the Nick Carbo-founded Visual Poetry group at YouTube. Created on 01/01/07, there are 86 videos so far. Contributors include Carbo, Shin Yu Pai, miporadio/Didi Menendez, Nico Vassilakis, and others. A mix of visual poetry videos--pieces written for the medium--and "videos" for poems: the audio is a poet reading her work, the visual is associated images. The first college project I was proud of was a video I created for Margaret Atwood's "Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein"--I was a freshman, and paid my geeky high-school ex $30 to record and edit me with his at-the-time hi-tech film equipment. I'd kill for that VHS tape now, which the professor kept and has probably since taped over or chucked. The video sampled "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and "Bambi Meets Godzilla," but was mostly original content overlayed with cheap video effects--for Atwood's line "The specimens/ranged on the shelves/applaud," I had 24 grinning Spaghettios cans in the frame, cycling through poppy color changes like Warhol's Maos. Sigh.